Ernest Shackleton is a central figure to my Long View Project which draws heavily on his Nimrod Expedition at Cape Royds. So I’ve been reading more about him (and by him) to gain insight into his legendary status in history. Most recently I read Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage which became a bestseller on its publication in 1959. Still in print, it’s perhaps the most popular book about Shackleton ever written.

A brief synopsis, spoiler and all:

Lansing’s story opens with a ship’s demise in the frozen Weddell Sea; its crew of 28 evacuate onto the pack ice that is crushing their vessel. The stranded party, we learn, is Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–17 (better known as the Endurance Expedition) whose initial objective was to attempt the first land crossing of Antarctica. Denied of even reaching land, the Endurance crew quickly shift their sights to surviving atop drifting ice floes.

Months later as the ice breaks up, they take to three lifeboats which they’d mercifully salvaged from their ship before it sank. In the face of relentless hardship and weather, the team, still miraculously intact, reaches tiny Elephant Island in the sub-Antarctic Ocean. They are on land for the first time in 497 days but the isolated frozen crag offers no hope of passing ships or rescue.

Consequently, Shackleton sets off with five of his men in the lifeboat James Caird for South Georgia Island to bring relief. The 800-mile journey succeeds against all odds, but lands them on the uninhabited side of the mountainous island, necessitating the first overland trek ever to the other side. Through more ice and snow, this too they survive — barely.

By this time winter has set in, surrounding Elephant Island in ice. Another four months pass before Shackleton can access it by rescue ship. When he does, he finds his entire party still alive, concluding one of the most incredible survival stories of all time.

Alfred Lansing wasn’t the only one to chronicle the Endurance adventure. Shackleton and at least four of his crew members published accounts of the voyage upon returning home, and there’s been a steady flow of literature since. But Lansing’s narrative stands apart for the sheer amount of research involved in piecing it together. According to his publisher, Lansing consulted with ten of the surviving expedition members and gained access to diaries and personal accounts by eight others. It shows in the nuanced descriptions of the men and their personalities, opinions, emotions, and relationships. These real-life human perspectives color the story, move it forward, and lend credibility to an extreme tale that could otherwise pass for fiction.

With Shackleton at the center of each unfolding drama, a comprehensive profile of his leadership emerges: ‘The Boss,’ as his men called him, was immensely respected for his generous character and principles of fairness. He shunned preferential treatment and partook in the grunt work equally. His ability to remain positive and decisive under the most challenging circumstances brought out the best in his team, and he maintained morale by keeping everyone occupied and essential to the effort. Perhaps most importantly, he possessed a sense of humanity that placed his crew’s mental and physical well-being ahead of all else.

Which isn’t to say that The Boss was infallible. He made his share of misjudgements along the way which Lansing readily points out. Readers may wonder why the voyage proceeded at all, given that the Weddell Sea’s ice conditions that year were the worst in memory and that veteran whalers there tried dissuading Shackleton from sailing until the following season.

My guess is that quitting simply went against Shackleton’s grain. Also, the trip was a limited-time opportunity: World War I was just erupting, reducing the chance of another try at the expedition anytime soon. And most certainly, his assessment of the situation differed from that of the whalers. As his granddaughter Alexandra points out: “He was a very practical person, and he would have never attempted anything that he thought could not be done. The main reason was that, above all, he had the lives of his men to consider.”

The first edition of Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage is shown in the photos above. It was published in 1959 by McGraw-Hill New York and Hodder & Stoughton, London. It’s desirable for the annotated endpaper map and a collection of captioned photos by expedition photographer Frank Hurley. A subsequent edition published by Carroll & Graf (1986/1996), pictured below, lacks the map and interior photos. The latest edition, issued by Basic Books (1999), announces a map and illustrations as part of the package.

Expect a wave of interesting new print and online material to emerge as the Endurance centenary approaches. There are a number of exciting events and celebrations in the works too, including adventurer Tim Jarvis’s Shackleton Epic which will attempt to recreate the journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia in a replica of the James Caird using similar materials, clothing, food and equipment to that of the 1916 crossing. It should be a good one to follow.

My series on Antarctic research stations continues with a salute to Ernest Shackleton’s Cape Royds hut, home base to his team’s 1907-09 British Antarctic Expedition, also known as the Nimrod Expedition. The Royds hut facilitated cutting-edge polar science of its day in the areas of geology, zoology, geography and meteorology. The scientific team’s director, Sir Tannatt William Edgeworth David, led from here the first parties ever to reach the South Magnetic Pole and the summit of Mt. Erebus, the world’s southernmost active volcano. Royds was also the launch pad for Shackleton’s 1908 attempt for the South Geographic Pole. His team trekked to within 97 nautical miles (180.6 km / 112.2 mi) of their goal, the farthest south attained by any expedition at the time.

It was also at Royds that Shackleton’s men printed and bound Aurora Australis, the first book ever published in Antarctica. It consisted of of essays, poems and drawings printed on a hand press in an edition of about 25 completed copies whose wooden covers were fashioned from provisions cases. Such crates, in abundance, were repurposed by them for hut shelving and furniture as well.

My use of wood, letterpress makeready, typographic letterforms, and book / bookshelf structure in Long View Study No. 21 allude to the Shackleton team’s production of Aurora Australis and their resourcefulness. The collage’s central figure is Sir Ernest himself who edited the book, wrote its two prefaces, and contributed an ode to Mount Erebus under the pseudonym NEMO.

My piece functions either as a wall hanging or a free-standing artwork. A detached wooden element serves as a shelf embellishment in wall mode or as a bottom support in free-standing mode. In either case the right-hand ‘shelf unit’ is modifiable with extra shelves of varying lengths. The hinged ‘spine’ indicates the manner in which the complete string of Long View panels will connect to one another to form an accordion-fold structure.

Frank Hurley was an Australian photographer and adventurer, most famous for his series
of artful photographs documenting Shackleton’s epic ‘Endurance’ expedition of 1914-17.
While the black-and-white images are well-known, a less familiar but equally stunning set
of his color pictures was recently put online by the State Library of New South Wales
in Sydney. I thought I’d share some of them here.

The color photographs were taken in 1915, the year the Endurance was crushed
by Antarctic ice in the Weddell Sea. They are among 120 glass plates in total that
Shackleton and Hurley chose to retrieve from the sinking ship. The captain and
photographer then smashed the remaining 400 plates to eliminate any temptation
of taking them along, recognizing that the party’s survival depended on meeting
space and weight limitations. The crew did endure their perilous 500-day ordeal,
as did the 120 photographic plates which they hauled by sledge and lifeboat, now
allowing us a glimpse into one of polar history’s most dramatic voyages.

Frank Hurley considered his color photos “amongst the most valuable records of the expedition.” He used an early polychrome process called Paget, which was patented
in 1912 in England and remained in use until the 1920s.

Paget used two plates, one a traditional black-and-white negative, the other a red,
green, and blue screen scored with a pattern of dots and lines. The negative was
contact-printed to made a transparency positive which was combined with the
matching color screen to achieve the final image. The process was eventually
eclipsed by the truer, richer colors captured by autochrome and later by Koda-
chrome.

The Endurance was the second of Hurley’s three voyages to Antarctica. His first was
as official photographer to Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition of
1911-14 which brought him to Shackleton’s attention. In 1914, Hurley was signed
on to the Endurance venture where he continued raising exploration photography to
new levels through unique compositions and storytelling with both still and movie
cameras.

His achievements are all the more impressive for the extreme conditions he braved.
He climbed masts, traversed splitting ice floes, and trekked in subfreezing temperatures
— often at night — to take his innovative photos. Lionel Greenstreet, the Endurance’s
First Officer, wrote of him: “Hurley is a warrior with his camera & would go anywhere
or do anything to get a picture.”

Getting the pictures was only part of the challenge; developing them on the ice-trapped
ship was another. The temperature in Hurley’s darkroom hovered around freezing, and
water for washing his plates was obtained by melting blocks of ice. He described the
difficulty in his diary: “Washing plates is a most troublesome operation, as the tank
must be kept warm or the plates become an enclosure in an ice block… Development
is a source of annoyance to the fingers which split & crack around the nails in a painful
manner.”

In 1917, Hurley returned to South Georgia (pictured in the four photos above) for his
final Antarctic filming expedition, culminating in the 1919 motion picture “In the Grip
of the Polar Pack” featuring his footage of the Endurance expedition. The movie quickly
became a critical and popular success, and his still photography also gained a wide
audience as Shackleton featured it in his lecture tours.

Hurley’s original photography and footage more recently appeared in NOVA’s giant-screen
film Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure as well as Shackleton’s Voyage of Endurance first
broadcast on NOVA in 2002. The Royal Geographical Society in London currently curates
Hurley’s original glass plate negatives and his original prints are held by the Scott Polar
Research Institute in Cambridge and the Macklin Collection in Aberdeen, Scotland.

A comprehensive selection of Hurley’s Paget color glass transparencies from the
Endurance expedition is showcased by the State Library of New South Wales online.

Who discovered Antarctica? Any number of early pioneers are credited, depending on how their accounts are interpreted. Here are the all-time top candidates:

The first reported sighting was by Russian Imperial Navy officer Fabian Gottlieb (Thaddeus) von Bellingshausen while commanding the second Russian expedition to circumnavigate the globe. Bellingshausen recorded seeing “ice mountains” on January 28, 1820 in the vicinity of what is now known to be the East Antarctic coastline. However his journals don’t mention that it may be land, and his expedition charts don’t indicate any land.

Two days later in the continent’s northwestern quadrant, British navy captain Edward Bransfield sighted the northernmost point of the Antarctic mainland, named it Trinity Peninsula, and produced the first recorded Antarctic land chart.

The next sighting of the continent was by American sealer Nathaniel Palmer in November 1820 — yet neither he, Bransfield, nor Bellingshausen were first to set foot on the continent. That distinction is claimed by American sealer John Davis who allegedly made the first landing on February 7, 1821 on the Antarctic peninsula’s west coast.

While these early pioneers certainly speculated on having encountered a significant land mass (John Davis’s logbook entry reads: “I think this Southern Land to be a Continent”), the first person to actually know he’d discovered a whole continent was United States Navy commander Charles Wilkes. In 1839-40 Wilkes’ expedition sailed along the edge of the ice pack south of Australia for some 1,500 miles, confirming the existence “of an Antarctic continent west of the Balleny Islands.”

This image depicts Bellingshausen, winner on the timeline if not for best evidence. He’s aboard his flagship, a 600-ton corvette named the VOSTOK (meaning “East”) after which the Russian research station and fascinating subglacial lake are named. The letters VOSTOK are incorporated into the piece and the graphic element on the right edge is Bellingshausen’s stylized Russian initials ФФБ.

The artwork was created with cut paper and graphite and is currently in MOVE, a group show curated by Rich Jacobs at Space 1026 in Philadelphia.

This diptych pays homage to Antarctic explorer Sir Tannatt William Edgeworth David, director of scientific staff on Shackleton’s 1907-09 Nimrod Expedition. On that voyage, David led the first parties ever to reach the South Magnetic Pole and the summit of Mt. Erebus, the world’s southernmost active volcano.

He was also a participant in the Nimrod crew’s production of the book Aurora Australis.
His 35-page narrative account titled The Ascent of Mount Erebus is the edition’s single lengthiest contribution.

My artwork’s left side references David’s lifelong engagement with geological investigations. The right-hand panel’s images represent his alma mater New College Oxford, his ascent of Mt. Erebus, his epic voyage to the ice plateau and back, and his professorship at the University of Sydney till age 82.

In 1920 David was created a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire,
and later helped set up the Australian National Research Council and served as its first President. Clearly his accomplishments — and these are just the ‘tip of the iceberg’ so to speak — are too numerous to fit into a mere diptych so I’ll be paying additional respects
in my final 12″ square panels.

This study measures 16″ wide x 9″ high. It was created in graphite and cut paper (using mostly found and recycled stock as usual) mounted on gessoed wood panels. It can be seen along with LV Study #5 at CUTTERS: An Exhibition of International Collage curated by James Gallagher at Cinders Gallery in Brooklyn from October 16 through November 15.

Photo © Australian Antarctic Division 2008

Lastly, I can’t close out this post without including David’s iconic self-portrait of himself (center) and his teammates Dr. Alistair Mackay (left) and Douglas Mawson raising the flag at the Magnetic South Pole on January 16, 1909. Their epic trek took over four months and 1,200 miles to complete. A thorough account of this journey replete with perils and close calls can be found in the Nimrod chapter of the Shackleton story here.

The 1988 Madrid Protocol, as I mentioned yesterday, calls for all Antarctic Treaty countries to remove their old trash as well as their newly generated waste from the continent. Twenty years on, cleaning up the old stuff remains the taller order because of irreversible early waste management practices.

One such practice involved bulldozing rubbish out onto sea ice during winter to have it sink when the ice broke up in spring. “Sea-icing,” as it was called, had its heyday from 1955 (when McMurdo Station was built) to 1981 (when sea-icing was discontinued). During this period, scores of fuel drums, machinery and scrap metal accumulated off McMurdo’s shores. Open burning, untreated sewage, oil and chemical spills, and coastal landfills also contributed high concentrations of hydrocarbons, PCBs, and other toxic chemicals to the water and bottom sediments.

The primary dumping ground during those decades was Winter Quarters Bay, seen here in January ’09 with a view towards McMurdo. Robert Falcon Scott had used this natural harbor to anchor his ship Discovery for two winters during his 1901-04 expedition. During their stay, he and his crew built the historic Discovery Hut seen at left.

Winter Quarters Bay would never be that clean again. By the 1990s, the cove was deemed one of the most polluted spots on Earth. (“Testing Tainted Waters.”)

Despite the clean-ups, contamination still exists and is likely to remain for some time. One reason is that hydrocarbons break down at very slow rates in Antarctic temperatures. Another factor is the cost and logistics of retrieving vast quantities of sunken trash. According to a 2001 New Zealand sponsored study, researchers revealed 15 vehicles, 26 shipping containers, and 603 fuel drums among approximately 1,000 items strewn across the Winter Quarters seabed. In addition, a 2005 survey determined that the act of decontaminating the bay risked creating greater adverse environmental impact than leaving the waste where it is. (“Contaminants Measured Near McMurdo.”)

On a positive note, the bay’s contaminants appear to be localized thanks to a shoal that prevents the toxins from spreading into open water beyond. I imagine Captain Scott cheering for that. And toasting the Madrid Protocol. And flipping over conscientious waste management. And high-fiving Shackleton over the ban on sea-icing.

This could be good sketch material. In the meanwhile, today’s drawing/collage juxtaposes stacks of stuff in Scott’s hut with stacks of stuff submerged outside his door to illuminate the proximity and continuity between them. More artwork to follow on this theme.

The subject of this ‘sister image’ to yesterday’s post is whaling.

The first Antarctic whaling station was established in 1904 at South Georgia island. By the mid-20th century, several of the eight whale species that populate Antarctic waters had been hunted to the edge of extinction. They’re now gradually recovering thanks to international regulation of commercial whaling in the Southern Ocean, though their numbers aren’t nearly that of a hundred years ago.

At the other end of the world by contrast, whale hunting has been central to the Inupiat people’s subsistence for over a millennium. I’m currently marveling over thewhalehunt.org, a unique photo-documentary of an Inupiat whale hunt in Barrow, Alaska. Its extraordinary approach to storytelling and brilliant interface was created by Jonathan Harris, with stunning photography by Andrew Moore. Not to be missed.

Greetings from San Francisco where I’m back with family, back in the studio, and back to the Long View Project blog. Apologies for the less frequent updates while I settle in and await arrival of the material I collected and shipped home from Antarctica to incorporate into my artwork. It’s taking a while since the boxes are coming by sea. Once they arrive though, I look forward to sharing the creative process with you here. That process — the actual assembly of the artwork — will initiate the second phase of the Long View Project as described in my introductory post a couple months back.

In the meanwhile, an update from where I last left off, high above Antarctica en route back to New Zealand:

After enjoying a month of Antarctica’s 24/7 summertime daylight (the better to enjoy these amazing views by)…

…it felt odd to be greeted by darkness in Christchurch.

I used my first full day here to visit the nearby port of Lyttelton with fellow artist grantee Judit Hersko. Lyttelton interested us as the launching point for early 20th-century British Antarctic expeditions. This view is from the Timeball Station, an historic 1876 landmark once crucial for navigation. The castle-like structure’s timeball, partially seen at the upper right of the photograph, was used to signal exact Greenwich time to the harbor’s vessels until 1934 when radio signals took over.

Beyond the pier in the center lies Quail Island where Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton trained their sled dogs and ponies before setting off on their voyages. The island is the plug of the ancient volcano forming Lyttelton Harbor.

Down the hill on Gladstone Quay, the Lyttelton Historical Museum features local history, oceanography and, of course, Antarctic exploration exhibits. In its former incarnation as the Seamen’s Institute, the building provided shelter to mariners including some of Robert Scott’s Terra Nova expedition crew.

Robert Scott’s dog, Deek, guards over his master, framed at lower left. Born in Siberia and trained on Quail Island, Deek was a favorite among Scott’s dozens of Samoyed sledge dogs. He survived the Terra Nova expedition (which Scott himself didn’t) and returned to New Zealand to live out his days as companion to the mayor of Christchurch.

Pony snow shoes from the same expedition of 1910-13 on display with oats for feed, found at Hut Point in 1964.

Given all the Terra Nova memorabilia on display, one could be forgiven for calling it “the Scott Museum,” as one past visitor described it to me. However the Lyttleton Museum’s exhibits do include artifacts from James Cook’s, Ernest Shackleton’s, and Richard Evelyn Byrd’s exploits too. The collection was definitely worth the visit.

The following day I returned to Christchurch’s Canterbury Museum which readers may remember from December 28 and again on the 31st. Except this time I was back by appointment specifically to see the collection’s copy of Aurora Australis housed in the museum’s Documentary Research Centre. This was a thrill because each of the original edition’s approximately 25 hand-bound copies is unique — notably the wooden covers cut from provisions cases. Much thanks to Natalie Cadenhead, the Canterbury’s Curator of Antarctic History for showing me both this and the museum’s South Polar Times collection — an added treat.

I traveled on to San Francisco the next day, having accomplished all I’d hoped to, and so much more.

Robert Scott’s Discovery team suffered during their two years at Hut Point. There was snow blindness, frostbite, and Shackleton himself was sent home with a debilitating case of scurvy midway through the expedition. But in spite of the suffering, or perhaps because of it, the men devised ways to entertain themselves throughout the ordeal, especially throughout the dark winter months.

Among these diversions was a play called “Ticket of Leave” staged in the frigid Discovery Hut. A brief account of the production can be found here along with an amusing photo of the troupe in costume, including the two “ladies” of the play. The hut was subsequently dubbed the ‘Royal Terror Theatre.’

A production of an entirely different kind was that of The South Polar Times, a newsletter edited by Shackleton during May–August 1902, preceding his affliction. This one really piqued my interest as a creation at the crossroads of art and science.

There was no printing press; the ‘publication’ consisted of a single typewritten copy passed hand-to-hand. The pages contained news, poetry, puzzles, scientific essays on geological, climatic, and biological topics, and not-so-scientific musings on the taste of penguin meat. Items were profusely illustrated with drawings, paintings, satirical cartoons, charts, maps,
and detailed zoological diagrams pasted into place to create pleasing layouts.

The page on the right, above, is titled “Events of the Month,” recounting the outset of the Discovery expedition. Among the entries: “April 6. An exciting seal chase;” “April 11. His Majesty the King became Patron of the Expedition;” “April 13. Windmill collapsed;” “April 18. Meteorological observations begun on the floe.”

The entire crew was invited to contribute words and pictures, and talent was evident among them. Most prominent is the art of Dr. Edward Adrian Wilson, the expedition’s junior surgeon, zoologist and official artist. His whale illustrations above are among 200 colored sketches of the Antarctic landscape and animal life he completed during the expedition, and he would return with Scott on the Terra Nova Expedition to render many more. Look for more on Wilson in the Crary Library post I have planned for the next day or two.

Left, Charles Royds, Royal Navy officer and First Lieutenant of the RRS Discovery who Cape Royds was named after. As of this writing, it’s unclear who drew these fabulous caricatures and most of the rest of the art — with the exception of Wilson’s recognizable style. I’ll be investigating art credits for the SPT in the weeks to come and will report my findings here.

‘Cutlets’ was the nickname of Reginald Koettlitz, the expedition’s chief surgeon and doctor.

Shackleton’s editorship of The South Polar Times was a natural; he had a fondness for literature and poetry, and enjoyed composing verse under his nom de plume, “NEMO.” The SPT‘s success quite likely gave him the impetus to plan the printing of Aurora Australis for his Nimrod party’s winter-over at Cape Royds in 1908.

Although not originally intended for publication, a collected South Polar Times was eventually compiled on the Discovery’s return home. The 3-volume anthology was printed in limited editions by Smith, Elder and Co. of London, 1907-1914. The first two volumes were issued in 250 numbered copies each, and the third in 350 numbered copies.

In the preface to volume 1, Robert Falcon Scott writes:
“The owner of these volumes will possess an exact reproduction of the original ‘South Polar Times’ which appeared month by month during the winters of 1902-3, produced as they were for the sole edification of our small company of explorers in the ‘Discovery’, then held fast in the Antarctic Ice. No attempt has been made to re-edit the text or to supply explanatory notes, and therefore it would be unfair to those who were responsible for it to omit mention of the circumstances under which the original volumes came into being. In March 1902 we were busily preparing for our first Antarctic winter as we watched the sun sinking towards its long rest. We knew that daylight would shortly disappear for four whole months, and our thoughts turned naturally to the long dark period before us and the means by which we could lighten its monotony. And so it was in this month that we met in council around the ward-room table to discuss the first Antarctic Journal; then and there we christened it, suggested its general lines, and appointed Mr. Shackleton as editor to guide its destiny. Our Journal, we decided, should give instruction as well as amusement; we looked to our scientific experts to write luminously on their special subjects, and to record the scientific events of general interest, while for lighter matter we agreed that the cloak of anonymity should encourage the indulgence of any shy vein of sentiment or humour that might exist among us. Above all, the ‘South Polar Times’, as we had determined to call it, was to be open to all; the men as well as the officers were to be invited to contribute to its pages.”

Hut Point is a short stroll around the harbor basin from McMurdo. Its summit is marked by
Vince’s Cross, a memorial to a lost crew member of Robert Scott’s Discovery expedition of 1901-04. I’ve been out there a couple times now, enjoying the light at different times of day. Even in a single visit, one vantage point can appear like twilight…

…while another offers broad daylight — which in fact it is, around the clock throughout the Antarctic summer.

At the foot of the windswept hill sits Robert Scott’s Discovery hut, the earliest of Ross Island’s three historical heritage sites. This was Scott’s base for his first attempt to reach the South Pole. Although he and his party members Ernest Shackleton and Edward Wilson didn’t make it that far, they did set a new record (82 degrees latitude) for southernmost travel at the time.

The Discovery ship’s crew erected the prefabricated hut in February 1902. It wasn’t entirely successful. Its Australian outback-style design was ill-suited to the elements and a lack of insulation kept most of the party living on the icebound ship just offshore.

Still, it served as space for storage, social gatherings, and scientific work. It was home to early advances in the study of earth sciences (notably understanding the Southern Hemisphere’s weather patterns), and of geology and zoology in the McMurdo Dry Valleys and the Cape Crozier Emperor Penguin colony. It was also from here that Scott’s discoveries of King Edward VII Land and the Polar Plateau via the western mountains route were launched.

The hut and much of its contents are still coated with black greasy soot generated from seal blubber burnt for heat, light and food. Heating the space must have been an uphill battle; it feels colder inside than outside.

Both Scott and Shackleton re-used the hut on later expeditions as a staging post, rendezvous point, and safe refuge. The date on this crate, for example, reveals activity eight years later by Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition based at Cape Evans. Items were swapped between huts up until 1917, after which they lay dormant and literally froze in time. Seal blubber hangs preserved on hooks, garments hang from clotheslines and artifacts still line the shelves, similar to (but sparser than) Shackleton’s Nimrod hut that I visited a few days back.

Like Shackleton’s hut, Scott’s Discovery hut is maintained by the Antarctic Heritage Trust as part of the Ross Sea Heritage Restoration Project. All four sites under the Trust’s care are listed in the World Monuments Fund 2008 Watch List of the World’s 100 Most Endangered Sites, and hold Antarctic Specially Protected Area status under the Antarctic Treaty System.